


The Camp

by lasergirl



Category: Firefly
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-04-02
Updated: 2010-04-02
Packaged: 2017-10-08 15:49:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,738
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/77243
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lasergirl/pseuds/lasergirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Wash has his own war story.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Camp

_**Firefly: The Camp**_  
**Title:** The Camp  
**Fandom:** _Firefly_  
**Rating:** PG (gore, violence, angst)  
**Summary:** Wash has his own war story.

**1\. Serious Hero Shirts**

Zoe and Mal, they have their war stories, and let them - they fought a war with guns and knives, in the wreckage of planets that had been their homes. They have their rank and battle honours, or whatever they have that passes for them, because at least they got hero stories, the kinds that make civilians swell with pride and awe and buy them rounds in outworld taverns. Yeah, big shiny heroes, standing tall and serious, they look real impressive and folks take them real serious.

But the goofy pilot, yeah, at least Wash is glad people don't take him too seriously. That'd be too much pressure for him to take sometimes. It's enough he's got _Serenity_ to fly, and a sea full of nothing but stars ahead, when he could be wearing some kind of serious hero shirt and trying to choke down bitterness and lies in a bar.

For one thing, the war was different on everyone. Some folks lost pretty much their whole planet to the Alliance, and some only got pushed around while unification was being sorted out. Some, by choice, took to the skies and black vaccuum of space, getting the hell off whatever backwater planet they were on before the Alliance could come and finish the job. Call it a voluntary retreat, escape, vacation - whatever - but it spelled Freedom.

Mal needed a pilot for the Grand Exit, and Wash needed a ship. _Serenity_ was there, right where she should have been, and the moment he stepped onto the bridge he knew he couldn't let her go. Staying would mean rotting to the core under Alliance rule, but flying - yeah, flying was a Good Thing. He flies like he looks, too - superficially erratic, twisted, playful, but underneath it all a backbone of steel, desperate and dangerous resolve.

And Wash does talk a lot, as if he's running his own commentary sometimes, filling the silence with babble. Subtle, he's not. But better out that in, you know? At least when he wakes up now it's not screaming, the taste of his own blood crawling down the back of his throat.

  
**2\. The Battle of Pleasance Range.**

The camp was a rutting nightmare - bare bones and laser-wire - an island in a sea of boiling mud and filth that housed eight thousand prisoners. It was a work camp, for those who could still stand, and for those who were only waiting to die it was a nightmare. When he was first dragged through the gates, Wash was dazed, delerious; to his eyes the whole camp was filled with walking skeletons, malign, restless staring faces and hungry jaws. Course, that might have been the infection.

He'd been shot down (or "eliminated" which was what the Alliance preferred - more clinical) flying a routine humanitarian aid run over the Pleasance Mountain Range. Dropping medicine, food, even clothing for the refugees to scavenge. How was he to know that was the same day Alliance scouts would be flying the same way? Or even, how they'd ignore the fat red cross on the side of his skimmer and send a couple of shots right up his tailpipe? But it happened, and Wash hit the ground pretty hard and after that things got a little blurry. So probably there weren't actually skeletons in the prison camp, but he wasn't going to swear to it one way or the other.

They pulled him out of the wreckage after three days; three days of crusted blood and steel, of frosts and screaming winds, of a numb, breathless amazement at the amount of damage the human body could take and live. Broken bones were expected, and there were burns. There hadn't been a pilot he'd met who hadn't talked about fuelflash, that first blinding burst of flame from a ruptured tank, and true to form it had blossomed around him as he remembered falling. He'd passed caring about his broken leg after three days, but the burns were fascinating, coronas of seared flesh around each droplet of fuel, a spray flung across one hip and thigh, his flightsuit burned away and hanging in tatters.

There were other insults and injuries, broken ribs and dislocated joints (hips, mostly, and shoulders - pilots always tried to correct, tried to twist in the air like cats) and enough cuts that he could watch the dark blood spreading like a continent under the remnants of his flightsuit. He figured after he landed it wouldn't take more than a couple hours before they killed him.

But things seldom go the way they are imagined. Even Wash, with his overactive, fertile brain could not have forseen that the Alliance would meet with resistance, would have to regroup into fighting formation over Pleasance and make a stand. It was a sortie that the Alliance won, and only three fliers were downed. Wash lay in the wreckage waiting to die, staring up at the naked sky and watching the dogfights passing overhead, smoke and con trails ribboning across the sky.

In the aftermath, during the cleanup and retrieval of fliers, and the brutal shepherding of coralled refugees into internment camps, a patrol stumbled across Wash's skimmer, wedged between two boulders so enormous that at first they thought no one could have survived. They nearly missed him, sheltered as he was under the remains of the starboard wing, if he hadn't raised his head and giggled. In hindsight, maybe not such a great idea.

So thankfully, he was pretty much out of it by the time he even got into the camp, past pain and caring and probably would have been way past living if he hadn't been poured into a medic booth and reconstituted. (So yeah, thanks, the Alliance inadvertantly killed and resurrected him. Like some kinda Jesus figure or something.) And then there was just the interminable camp.

It was a labour camp, though Wash didn't work on account of his broken parts. He hobbled around with his leg plastered up, whole body in stitches, or laid in his bunk trying to fight back the screamed inside him from giving anyone else the same nightmares. There was no infirmary, just the barrack shed with row upon row of bunks, and the sick just lay there until they recovered or died, and that was that. In the beginning he woke up most days with blood glueing him to the sheets. Halfway to sleep, he'd sob like a baby until someone showed him Nephrethene.

Curious thing he picked up from the locals then, in desperation when the medic pods wouldn't dope him up and he could feel insects crawling around under his skin. Nephrethene - a deadly, sickly-sweet syrup made from the poisonous fruit of a scrubby local plant called Nephrite. The refugees brewed it over the cookstoves in the barracks and the guards turned a blind eye, hoping that the drink would kill them before the execution squads had to.

It was a ritual; a finger of the syrup, shaken around the sides of a ration mug, drowned with water - beer or better if you could get it - swallowed down until your lips and tongue went numb. In the crying darkness, someone held a mug to Wash's lips and whispered 'drink this' and he did - and the pain and nerves slowly faded out until he could see the stars again.

  
**3\. Shadows on the Wall**

There were good days, mixed in with all the awful, aching torturous days where he could barely breathe and hardly find the strength to open his eyes to stare at the wall. There were days when the sun came out and he was allowed outdoors, to hunch down against the side of the shelters and soak up the heat and light like it was the last thing on the planet. Those days rated better than anything. Always, there was a mouthful of bittersweet poison ready to take it all away, to numb the body and wrap the mind in sleep.

Sure, there were the walking dead, though if they had souls Wash would eat his hat; they were drones, the pitiful emotionless wrecks that the Alliance used to keep the camp going. Some of them had been there years already, entrenched in the nightmarish muck without a hope or a thought of anything. He saw them file out of the barracks day by day, dull eyes fixed on the shoulders of the one in front, hands gripping pickaxes, shovels - they were dirt miners - a chain gang bound by silence.

Wash didn't work - couldn't - and sat around with the elders, the refugee locals who brewed the Nephrethene from the blood-black berries scavenged by the dirt miners. When they found out he wasn't a narc or an insider, that he was a bona fide genuine Rebellion pilot, they actually talked to him. It seemed like it had been years since he'd be interned, but it wasn't even ten months. All the seasons were the same on that prison rock.

He didn't understand why the refugees didn't just drink it straight, burning down the throat, a quick painless death and a sure way out of the camp. Sure, but that would let the Alliance win; that was what the Alliance wanted. Why give them the pleasure?

He talked; stories were a rare treasure and he gave them what he remembered of the bedtime stories from his mother. The little ones - there were always children in the camps, a sad reality - gathered around and begged for more. When his voice went hoarse he made finger animals, cast their shadows on the barrack walls. Dogs biting geese, elephants, brontosaurus; the Ark of the Earth That Was. He saw the ghosts of smiles begin to wisp across the skeleton faces, brief sparks of life dancing in their eyes.

So they brought him leather, then, tanned and dark and thick as a horse's hide, and Wash thought it was better he didn't ask what manner of creature it came from, it being wartime and all. Just as like to be the guy in the bunk next to his, as some dead animal from further off. He didn't think on the odds, either, cause if a guy could get thrown in a prison camp just for flying medical supplies to refugees, anyone could be murdered and skinned.

He carved out creatures, people, ancient king lizards, and let the children play in the flickering light from the cookstoves. He carved out tiny skimmers, hulking Alliance cruisers, v-formations of Rebel fliers; an entire war projected onto the walls of their prison. He played it out every night; the battle in his head, the million variations that would have let him live, finally, to see freedom and open skies again.

  
**4\. A Sea of Stars**

It wasn't heroics that freed Wash, or any of the other prisoners in the camp; it was failure, sheer catastrophic defeat that yanked the Alliance off-planet, chasing after the ghost-squadrons of Rebellion fliers, leapfrogging from system to system, always a step ahead. The camp wasn't disbanded officially, it just disintegrated into wandering tribes, when the refugees started making forays into the hills searching for their old homesteads and footpaths. There wasn't much left - Alliance had razed half the planet - but they found enough to keep them there, and so they went. What they couldn't carry they left behind, so eager to put the past behind them.

Eventually the Rebellion had done a cleanup sweep of the rock and found him, half-gone on Nephrethene, wandering what was left of the prison camp and staring at the sky. He couldn't explain what he was doing there, but the medics found the truths on his body, in the arcs of flash-scars and shadowy knitted bones. Maybe they doubted him, but they never asked the questions. The testament was all around him, the barrack sheds and fallen fences, the interminable expanses of seared land and mud, the skeletons of machines and men between rock formations on the hilltops.

He wavered, drifting from place to place, strung across systems that even he'd barely heard of. He tried to make a honest day's pay but the world just wasn't cut out for people like him. In the end, it was the feel of rock under his feet that pushed him back into the sky; it was Mal and _Serenity_ that he found, or maybe the ship found him, cutting through all the endless talk and chatter to get right down to the bitter, bitter core. _Do you want to fly?_ And of course the answer was _Yes_. Better than drinking poison on some isolated prison rock for the rest of your life.

Of course, he found out that when Mal and Zoe got going on their old hero stories, then it could feel just a little like a prison, but that was when Wash just turned the other way and stared out at the sea of stars that sailed past. But they never lasted long, those stories, because the past was past. Because a ship was never a prison, no, though they sailed through the black and the crush of open space, it was never like that. _Serenity_ was escape, peace of mind. _Serenity_ was freedom.

END.

Author's Notes:

Hi. Yeah. I'm not entirely sure if what I was trying to sketch out worked very well here. It sort of comes across as a writer's shorthand for Wash's character development, which is I guess what I was trying to work with. There are all sorts of other things that elaborate these shorthand bits, too, but I don't want to get sucked into writing the whole story at once, because I'd definitely not do it justice at this point.

This characterization of Wash is based on a few lines from the actual shows, and also a few comments from Alan Tudyk in episode commentaries. Quite obviously, Wash hates war stories, but he never gets the opportunity to tell his own. That could either be because he doesn't have one, or the one he does have was damaging enough that he'd never want to talk about it. In the commentaries, Alan does mention that his character had a war bio, but that the most he could get into the script was "How are we going to entertain them? Shadow puppets?" Also, he says "Wash doesn't like those kind of stories."

Additionally, Wash's verbosity could be suspect, perhaps he's hiding behind the talking (and the cheesy moustache) by using it as a diversion. He's also not a calm flier, which could be residual nerves. Also he deals pretty well under torture and doesn't lose his resolve.

I like this character background and I'd like to work it into stories somehow without it seeming totally made up. But this was the groundwork thesis, so it had to be posted first.  


Story Notes:

Shadow Puppets: The really good ones, Indonesian, etc, are made from thick leather and manipulated with thin sticks. They aren't used in the way I illustrated (i.e. between a light and a wall) rather, they are used between a light source and a screen, like a projection tv sort of, with the puppeteer behind the screen.

Nephrethene obviously doesn't exist. It's a combination of 'Nepenthe' (ancient Greek medicinal preparation) and Nephros (Greek for 'kidney.') I figured that since the kidneys are you body's poison control centre, it was a good name for something so obviously toxic.

The Camp: I liked the idea of a hands-off prison camp, run superficially by guards, but without support staff (i.e. the prisoners are pretty much left to fend for themselves). Also, the medical assistance isn't very helpful as it's a remote-controlled AI pod sort of thing. The Alliance probably has the prisoners digging trenches and tunnels, hence the dirt miners.

Red Cross: Wash isn't military, and he isn't Alliance, but there's no evidence he actually fought during the war, so I made him a Rebellion-sympathetic relief worker. Technically, he wasn't aiding the Rebellion by dropping those supplies, which makes him innocent after he's rescued/released. He's technically not a fugiitive or a sympathizer, just a guy who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. It's always good to paint the Alliance as Bad Guys, too.

Questions? Comments? Feedback always appreciated.


End file.
